Stay on target

It may have taken The Flash almost a full season, but they finally managed to make a decent villain out of The Thinker. It would have been nice to know why we should have been scared of him since the beginning, but at least they made it before the finale. And with Harry Wells’ sad loss of intelligence, we know exactly what the stakes are. It really feels like, against all odds, The Flash has set us up for a great final battle. You know, once we get to it next week. Here, The Thinker shows us exactly why he should be feared in the episode’s opening moments.

We see John Diggle from Arrow approach the ARGUS facility where Fallout is being held. It quickly becomes very obvious that this is not John Diggle. I will say though, David Ramsey does an excellent job of mimicking Neil Sandilands’ speech patterns in this scene. It’s a shockingly perfect impression. Soon, it’s obvious to everybody that this is The Thinker using Elongated Man’s shape-shifting powers. He kills the guards outside the facility, and heads on in. The Flash doesn’t usually give us a hallway fight scene like this. They’re usually reserved for the Marvel Netflix shows. After watching this, maybe they shouldn’t be. It’s a fantastic scene. DeVoe uses every one of the powers he collected to take out the guards. It’s brutal, well-choreographed, and I never wanted it to end.

Grant Gustin as Barry Allen and David Ramsey as John Diggle (Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW)

The Flash might have started the show with a showstopper, though. With a fight scene as great as this, nothing that followed could live up to it. So what we end up with is a solid, standard episode of The Flash. It plays all the hits: Barry being an obnoxious worrywart, Barry’s friends telling him to cut the crap, a meaningless timer… the only thing it doesn’t have is the can-I-talk-to-you hallway and thank God for that. Right before DeVoe kills or otherwise incapacitates everyone,one scientist is able to send a garbled message to S.T.A.R. Labs. The Flash runs to Star City to fetch the real Diggle, and the rest of Team Flash stands by with a bucket. You’d think the joke of Superspeed making Diggle throw up would get old after a while, but it’s still just as funny each time. Maybe because it only happens a couple times a season.

With Diggle’s help (thanks for the cameo, David Ramsey!), Team Flash realizes what The Thinker’s trying to do. He’s forcing Fallout to go nuclear so he can power his shrunken satellites. Then, he can launch them in the air, and grow them to full size on their ascent. And it’s going to take him 12 hours to do it! So we essentially have at ticking time bomb here. Usually an easy source of tension for any TV show. It would be here too if The Flash didn’t almost entirely ignore it from here on out. That’s the problem with ticking clocks on this show. The Flash has super speed. 12 hours is a ton of time for him. That’s why the best episode of the season had The Flash trying to defuse a bomb that had already gone off. So the rest of this episode proceeds at an odd leisurely pace considering there’s a clock counting down to the end of the world.

So The Flash has to get into ARGUS to stop DeVoe, and he knows how to do it. ARGUS has an electrified floor he can use to charge up his speed. If he triggers it, he can leap into DeVoe’s pocket dimension as he escapes and follows him. From there, he can destroy one of his satellites, and the Enlightenment will be stopped. There’s a problem, though. DeVoe has suspended scientists above the floor. If The Flash triggers one of the panels, they’ll die. Fortunately, Cisco and Caitlin come up with a solution. In a callback to the aforementioned best episode, Barry will take them into Flash Time, where Cisco will vibe open a portal while Caitlin provides a platform with a cold gun. They just need training to learn how to operate at that speed. And that’s what the entire episode is about.

The episode becomes one long training sequence, which is where it loses a lot of tension. Really, they have a literal countdown to doomsday and they have time to stand around and practice? The story follows all the beats of the previous Flash training episodes. The trainees experience some setback. In this case, it’s that they have trouble using their powers/devices at superspeed. They fail to remain calm, fall out of balance and crash to the floor at superspeed. As happens every time, Barry gets worried about putting his friends in danger and calls off the whole thing. How is this still a problem? Why does Barry have to learn this lesson again? This is the show’s fourth season, and it feels like we’ve gone back to this well at least 12 times.

Even the show is speeding through these story beats at this point. As if it’s saying to us, “yeah, yeah, you know the drill.” Caitlin and Cisco convince Barry that all they need is a little more training, and then we never see them train again. They just go straight into ARGUS, and suddenly Caitlin and Cisco can use their abilities at superspeed perfectly. The hostages are saved, Barry follows DeVoe through a portal and destroys a satellite. This scene is also some great Flash action. It’s not as good as the opening sequence, but it’s still cool to watch Barry run up a building and blow up a satellite. But DeVoe doesn’t seem too disappointed by his whole plan going up in smoke. And by the end of the episode, Barry realizes why. DeVoe had taken over a S.T.A.R. Labs satellite. He locked himself in the secret Gideon computer room, and is using Team Flash’s own tech to carry out the Enlightening. So in this whole episode, Barry basically accomplished nothing.

Neil Sandilands as Clifford Devoe (Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW)

Honestly, that ending made the episode feel a little pointless. At least it was a decently fun pointlessness though. Despite going through the tired motions of the Flash training story again, watching Cisco and Caitlin learn to work at superspeed was cool. And the side-story where Cecile started taking on other peoples’ personalities provided some genuinely funny comic relief to an overall serious script. It also led to one of the show’s more genuinely startling revelations. Cecile, after accidentally diving into Caitlin’s head, realizes she’s suppressing something. Caitlin asks Cisco to vibe her and figure out what that was. It’s a memory of a bike crash when she was a little girl, where she almost got hit by a car. In that moment, she looked in her bike’s mirror and saw Killer Frost staring back. So, Frost was a part of Caitlin since before the S.T.A.R. Labs explosion.

That’s an exciting development to be sure, but I don’t think we’ll really dive into it until next season. Next week is the season finale, and with the Enlightenment in progress, Team Flash has bigger things to worry about. Between that and the mysterious speedster girl (Dawn Allen maybe?), I’m almost more excited for Season Five than I am for this one’s finale. But there’s plenty to look forward to next week too. After the fight that opened last night’s episode, I’m expecting a lot from The Flash and The Thinker’s final showdown.